By Steve Wishnia

Under a gray sky on Brooklyn’s Red Hook waterfront, several dozen Teamsters picketed Amazon’s new delivery station Oct. 30 in solidarity with striking workers in Southern California.

The 84 drivers and dispatchers from Amazon’s DAX8 delivery station in Palmdale, north of Los Angeles, have been on strike since June. Amazon refused to recognize a contract that their union, Teamsters Local 396, had reached with Battle-Tested Strategies, a “delivery service partner” the company hires to deliver packages for the “last mile” to customers.

On June 24, after the workers walked out in an unfair-labor-practice strike, Amazon fired all of them.

“We’re spreading the word that 84 Palmdale drivers aren’t going to take it anymore,” Palmdale driver Tom Culver II told Work-Bites, as picketers circled outside the blue-and-white structure, perched alongside an inlet from the Erie Basin harbor.

Amazon drivers in Brooklyn “have the same working conditions,” he added, and he is “hoping they jump on board” with the union.

Pay and safety were the main reasons for the union drive, said Culver, who has been delivering packages for Amazon for four years. The vans they drove for 10 to 12 hours a shift — some owned by Amazon, others rented by the company — were on the road 365 days a year and poorly maintained, he explained: The heaters often didn’t work in the high desert winters; the air-conditioning often didn’t work in the summer heat; the brakes were sometimes too worn out to work well; and sometimes the engines blew because the oil hadn’t been changed in time.

The Brooklyn picket was one of more than 20 the Teamsters have done in solidarity with the Palmdale strike, at Amazon warehouses in California, Connecticut, Georgia, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Jersey, and New York. They picketed both sides of the Brooklyn warehouse, trying to hand flyers to the drivers coming in on one side and those going out on the other. Some of the drivers going in were receptive, they said, but the drivers going out, watched by a supervisor, kept their windows rolled up.

Amazon began using delivery service partners in 2018. It now says it has almost 3,000, in the U.S. and more than a dozen other countries, including Canada, Germany, France, India, Brazil, and Saudi Arabia. It says they employ more than 275,000 drivers and deliver a total of more than 10 million packages a day.

Palmdale issues

The Palmdale drivers and dispatchers signed their first contract with Battle-Tested Strategies in April. It would have raised their wages from $19.75 to $30 an hour. But Amazon immediately terminated its contract with the company, six months before its expiration date. It then argued that the workers were not its direct employees.

The Teamsters have filed multiple unfair-labor-practice complaints about Amazon’s actions in Palmdale with the National Labor Relations Board. Their accusations include that the company refused to bargain with Local 396, shut down the unionized unit in retaliation for employees’ union activities, and illegally transferred work from Battle-Tested Strategies to nonunion delivery services.

The union says Amazon’s claim that the Palmdale workers are not its employees is a scam.

“Although these drivers wear Amazon uniforms, drive Amazon trucks, identify themselves as Amazon employees, are continuously monitored and surveilled by Amazon managers, and receive their work assignments from Amazon, Amazon has attempted to legally separate itself from these employees through a sham ‘Delivery Service Partner’ structure,” the Teamsters’ lawyers argue in the complaint. “Amazon provides ‘branded’ DSPs everything from the trucks to the uniforms that drivers use—all prominently displaying Amazon’s logo exclusively—requiring that the DSP obtain this equipment from Amazon-affiliated providers. When using these Amazon trucks, the DSPs are prohibited from driving for any customer other than Amazon. Amazon creates the routes, sets delivery targets and goals, directly oversees and monitors the performance of the Amazon drivers.”

“Somebody has to do something,” Local 804 member Antonio Rosario, taking a break from leading chants on a bullhorn, told Work-Bites. “Amazon is driving down industry standards.”

UPS drivers will make as much as $49 an hour by the end of their current contract, said Rosario, who has worked there for 29 years, while most Amazon drivers make less than $21. Amazon’s warehouse workers have an injury rate twice as high as those in other warehouses, he added (almost one out of 15 was seriously hurt on the job in 2022, according to federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration data), and the company’s employee turnover rate is 150% a year.

“It should be equal pay for equal work,” Rosario said. Amazon drivers are doing the same job as UPS drivers, he continued. “They’re out there delivering packages. They deserve pensions and benefits, not sweatshop wages.”

Earlier this year, Rosario noted, UPS workers won a 48% raise “with just practice picketing and a serious threat to strike.”

“We’re here to show Amazon drivers they can do the same thing,” he declared.

After about an hour, police arrived to tell the picketers that they couldn’t walk across the driveway. Union representatives responded that they moved out of the way whenever vans came out.

“When did Jeff Bezos buy the sidewalk?” one man called out.

The picketing continued.